Easier, safer transplant offers new diabetes hope

Melbourne diabetes sufferers will soon have access to a quick, safe pancreas transplant that can be done as a day procedure.

The operation, which St Vincent's specialist Tom Kay described as "the future of pancreas transplants", could free type one diabetes patients from the daily routine of injecting insulin.

Professor Kay, director of St Vincent's Institute for Medical Research, said he expected to start performing the operation by the middle of this year.

Type one, or juvenile onset, diabetes, affects more than 20,000 Victorians. It is a condition in which the pancreas does not produce insulin, the hormone that regulates the burning of blood sugar to fuel muscles.

Pancreas transplants have been performed for years, but they are difficult operations with a high risk of complications.");document.write("

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In the new procedure using a donated pancreas, doctors remove the pancreatic islets - clumps of about 1000 cells that make the insulin - and inject them like a blood transfusion. The first recipients would be diabetes sufferers with dangerously fluctuating blood sugar levels.

Neil Boyce, executive director of LifeGift, the Victorian Organ Donation Service, said he hoped the operation would become more common.

There was a trade-off, Professor Kay said. Instead of taking insulin for the rest of their lives, transplant recipients would have to take immunosuppressant drugs to stop their bodies rejecting the islets.